Little anecdote. You come home, triumphant, with a brand new vacuum cleaner, paid half the price at a department store. You just took advantage of an exceptional promotion, but then out of curiosity Look online to see if there are any better ones. And in a couple of minutes you discover that it cost a few euros more, but with two free brushes, that on Amazon there was another offer for a more powerful model and that if you had had the patience to wait for Black Friday you would have found yet another one. If after your online searches you open Instagram or Facebook, here comes another avalanche of unmissable promotions.
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The collective ritual of sales has no longer existed for years. Until about ten years ago, the newspapers reported every year about the queues in front of the shops: to get the coat admired in the previous months and also of the right size it was essential to arrive first. The sales were a serious business, born with fascism and regulated for the first time in 1980, when the Christian Democrat deputy Aristide Tesini established that the Chambers of Commerce should decide the periods of the year: a maximum of two, summer and winter, for no more than four weeks.
But with the galloping of online shopping, together with the passion for Halloween we have also inherited that for Black Friday. Born in the United States to dispose of the overabundant production, coincides with the day after Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Day. It marks the start of Christmas shopping, even if in November everything seems ready for Christmas. But then came the Cyber Mondaythe Monday dedicated to discounts on technology items and also the Fake Friday, which this year falls today, Friday 17 November, and is the Friday before Black Friday. And then there are the special offers from the big platforms, such as for example’Amazon Prime Dayjust to name one more.
We are overwhelmed by the unmissable offers, the half price offers, the liquidations. And one suspects that the regulation on sales is more of a sieve, unthinkable and impossible to put into practice in an online universe that has completely transformed every rule of the game. For years now, consumer associations have been calling for progressive liberalisation, dubbing the sales “a mere ritual to allow traders and their associations to tear their clothes off and continue to carry out their lobbying to prevent the economy from liberalising”.
In the economy of perpetual promotion, now those who stand out are those who never do sales, ever. Like the Artknit Studios brand, which writes «on our site you will not find items on sale either during seasonal sales or during Black Friday. We don’t want to encourage unsustainable consumption habits with discounts that last for a limited time: we prefer to promote more conscious and reasoned choices by offering garments created to last a long time.” Will it be the new trend, the new status, to be more noticed without being there?